On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 01:49:43PM -0500, Matt Riggsby wrote:

>What I'm looking for, though, is the next step: 
>How can I figure out how much of that resource can be shipped to a
>central point?  If, say, mana pools scattered all over a region
>produce x points of mana a day, which can be pumped through magical
>pipelines at a cost of y points of mana per mile, how many points of
>mana can be piped to a city or temple at the center of a region with a
>radius of x/y miles?

If anyone else would like to check my maths, please feel free!

Let's say you have a ring of radius r around your target location. There
will be approximately D.r sites at that radius (assume no granularity;
this is the limiting case for large radii or a high density of sites),
where D is a density measure which we'll define later. Assume each site
produces x resources (which I think may be a change from your
symbology). The amount of resource each site can provide to the target
location is x-ry (r = distance from target), so that ring as a whole
produces at the target:

Drx-Dr^2y

If we integrate that over r (range 0 to R, the radius of the region), we
get:

DR^2x/2 - DR^3y/3
(total productivity less total transport costs)

The total number of sites within the radius is, similarly, DR^2/2.
Converting to your inputs, we can substitute:

X (total production) = x D R^2/2

Total deliverable = X - X R * 2y/3x

In the special case where R = x/y, then 1/3 of the produced resource is
delivered.

Roger
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